Is it possible that the fittest individuals in an Artificial Life population may be successful by not actively pursuing the rules of the environment?
It is entirely possible!
You see, the agents will perform whatever actions are available to them, and if the evolutionary algorithm is setup correctly, whatever set of actions provides them with a bigger survival rate will be the one that gets explored and reproduced the most.
Here is a very interesting list of &quot;Specification Gaming&quot; in AI, where the agents happened to &quot;game&quot; the rules to reach their goals (metric optimization) without actually doing what the creators intended: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml (second link)